Regional Synod of Canada - Reformed Church in America

Pioneer Christian Monthly

Date - May/67

Contributor - Rev. T. Hoogerwourd

Title - Regeneration (The New Birth)

Topic - Regeneration

Principal Dr. James Denney, the eminent theologian and New Testament scholar has made an extensive study of what the New Testament has to say about regeneration (the new birth). What follows here is a summary of a long article which he wrote about that subject (1).

Introduction

Of all theological ideas, regeneration is probably that which has had the most unfortunate history. The figure is an apt and obvious one to express the completeness of the change which takes place when the non-Christian becomes a Christian, but it is tempting to press it, and it has been pressed in the most inconsiderate fashion. As the beginning of Christian life (it is argued), it must be antecedent to every Christian experience; faith, justification, conversion are, strictly speaking, its fruits. As a new birth, man can no more contribute to it than to his first birth, and hence must be regarded in it as purely passive, not acting or co-operating with God. As there is no middle state between being dead and being alive, it must be conceived as instantaneous; and so on.

We can see the motives in such a mode of thought, but it is full of delusions. Perhaps they have influenced Reformed theology more than Lutheran; yet, while the Lutherans were more conscious of the figure in regeneration, the Reformed were guided by the justifiable desire to give faith a real basis in the believer, to lay an act of God, as the only sure foundation, at the basis of the whole experience of salvation.

The word "new birth" and its meaning

The word regeneration occurs in AV only in Matth. 19 : 28, Tit. 3 : 3 while the figure of a new or second birth is most distinctly expressed in our Lord's conversation with Nicodemus (John. 3).

To see the real basis for the figure of the new birth, it is necessary to go back to the teaching of Jesus in the Synoptics (the first three Gospels) and to look at its substance and not merely its formal expression. What the figure conveys, vividly and truly, is the idea that a man has become another man; he has entered into a new order of being; things once have lost reality; real to him things once unknown are now alone real. If we find this idea in the teaching of our Lord. we find what is meant by regeneration, even though that figure should not expressly appear.

The Kingdom of God introduced an order of things which was entirely new. It was itself, in a comprehensive sense a "new birth" (Matth. 19 : 28). But everything connected with it, involved in it, or leading up to it, awoke in the mind the same sense of newness. In spite for example of our Lord's feeling of the continuity of His work with the O.T. (I came not to destroy but to fulfill). He has the equally strong feeling that with the time of fulfilment a new era has dawned. (The Law and the prophets were until John; from that time the kingdom of God is preached, and everyone presses into it). The newness is so complete, the distinction so great, that the least in the Kingdom of God is greater than the greatest in the old dispensation (Matth. 11 : 11). The same truth underlies all the passages in which Jesus claims for Himself absolute significance in determining the relations of God and man. Jesus alone reveals the Father, and the man who knows the Father, is no longer the same man. No words could be too strong to tell how completely he is another. This absolute significance of Jesus is the sum 'and substance of His self-revelation (Matth. 16 : 13 ff). The truth of 'regeneration' is an immediate inference from it. (Compare also, the parables of the new patch on the old garment and the new wine in the old skins). In Mt. 18 : 3 we find: "except ye turn and become as little children, you shall in no wise enter into the Kingdom of heaven". To become as a little child is really to be born again; it is what this figure of a new birth properly means, and it is the only key to it which the words of Jesus yield. In the words of Jesus, evidently, it describes a moral requirement; it is something that He demands from those who would be His disciples and enter the Kingdom, and it is achieved through "turning". The context defines what "turning" means. It means giving up ambition, pride, self seeking, by-ends in religion, and other unchildlike tempers; it is in short identical what is elsewhere in the Synoptics called metanoia or repentance. It is through the moral change, the responsibility for which is laid upon man, that he becomes a little child, that is: born again.

Perhaps another approach to, the figure of regeneration (though that of resurrection is equally obvious) may be recognized in the passages where Jesus speaks of the sinful life as death, and of recovery from it as a return to or entrance into life. There are two of these in the Synoptics (Matth. 8 : 22), Luke 15 : 24, 32): obviously the emphasis in both is moral, not metaphysical. A change of character is in view, which, however deep and far reaching, raises none but moral problems. More important, however, than these are the passages in which our Lord teaches that the new or higher life - the regenerate life, to call it so - can be won only through sacrifice of a lower life. In other words, to have a life which is life indeed, we must surrender the other; we must die to nature in order to live to God. We must renounce self; a new and radical idea without formal analogy in the O.T. if we are to share in the Kingdom. The man who refuses to do so, who cannot find it in him to do violence to nature, is incapable of discipleship and of the life which is life indeed. This is the burden of our Lord's teaching in such passages as Matt. 16 : 24, 10 : 3 9, 18 : 8 f, Luke 14 : 25). It contains all that is meant by regeneration, but it does not use that figure to express it. And again it is all within ethical limits.

The Letters of the apostle Paul

In the Book of Acts we see the reality of the new life; the apostle of the gentiles, Paul, became a Christian in a way which must have impressed him profoundly with the difference between the Christian life and that of the pre-Christian state. NO one could say with greater truth than he: "I am now another man". But in him the change took place in a way which was in the highest degree startling and abnormal; it could not possibly suggest to him anything so natural as being born; and it agrees with this that, though no one has a more adequate sense than Paul of the absolute newness of the Christian life, he never uses the figure of regeneration to convey this. He speaks of the New Covenant of which he is a minister, of the new creature he has become, of the new world in which he lives, of the new man who has been created according to God in righteousness and holiness and truth and who is being renewed unto knowledge after the image of Him that created him; he also speaks of being transformed by renewal of mind; in walking in newness of life and serving God in newness of spirit, but he never speaks formally Of being born again.

Even when he contrasts the past and the present as death and life, the life is not conceived as coming by birth, but either by a creative act of God analogous to that by which at first He commanded light into being out of darkness or by an exercise of the same almighty power with which God wrought in Christ when He raised Him from the dead, and set Him at His own right hand in the heavenly places; when we were dead in trespasses He quickened us together with Him.

It is essentially the same change which Paul represents elsewhere as translation from the tyranny of darkness to the Kingdom of God's dear Son or from the state of condemnation to that of justification, or from the life after the flesh to life after the Spirit, or in more mystical fashion (or metaphysical) from being in Adam to being in Christ. It is not necessary here to discuss what is called Paul's psychology as though he had such a thing in the sense of modern mental philosophy; he has really no psychology: he knows what he was and he knows what he is, in the way of moral experiences and he generalizes his past and his present into the conditions of the natural man and the spiritual man. Every man in himself is the natural man, a descendant and representative of Adam, every man has through the Gospel the opportunity of becoming a spiritual man, a child of God and a representative of Christ. It is to then dead in Christ, whose old man has been crucified with Christ that Paul says: "Put to death your members that are on earth; reckon yourselves to be dead unto sin." Experience is a process, and in the life of a spiritual being it cannot be dated; the things that in a sense happened twenty years ago are also present experiences, and it may be only now that we are discovering their real meaning.

The writings of the apostle John

The term being born of God occurs frequently in the Gospel of John and in his other writings. Especially in John 3 (the conversation with Nicodemus). No experience is described or demanded in it which has not yet come before us independently; the new birth is only a new figure which gives vivid and suggestive expression to a truth which the Lord Himself in the Synoptic record, and the Apostles in their writings have already :expressed in other forms. John gives no description of the content of the new birth, no analysis of it as an. experience which enables us to put more into "turning and becoming as little children" or into "dying to sin and living to God", or "putting off the old man and putting on the new".

The action of God through which the new life emerges in man cannot be prescribed or calculated; it is as unquestionable in its effects as His action in nature, but there is something in it which eludes control. The sense of this underlies all the predestinarian passages in both St. John and St. Paul, but of course, they are not to be read alone. We should completely misrepresent both apostles if we supposed that because of their sense of dependence upon God for being the new men they were impaired i their sense of responsibility in this relation.

The mind is apt, and perhaps the feeble or insincere mind is glad, to escape from the moral to the metaphysical, from Matth. 18 : 3 to John 3 : 6, there is more to talk about and less to do, but there is no ground for bringing this charge against the apostles. It is easy with regard to St. John as with regard to St. Paul to ask questions connected with his doctrine of regeneration to which he himself does not afford any answer. Thus the new birth is made dependent somehow on baptism, but it has been argued that 1 12 "children of God are spoken of, who were 'born of God' before the Incarnation", and that in 11 52 "children of God" are spoken of as "scattered throughout the world" who are to be gathered into one by the death of Jesus.

Paul says in one breath: "You are dead" and in the next "Put to death therefore"; it is impossible to tell whether any given spiritual experience is that of the regenerate or the unregenerate man. The regenerate and the unregenerate man - for better or worse - cannot be separated in this summary way. The practical interest of the Apostles compels us to interpret them everywhere through experiences we can understand; hence it is vain to seek in them any suggestion of what regeneration can mean in the case of baptized infants. There is no indication in the N.T. that they ever contemplated any such case.

Regeneration is a moral experience regarded as the work of God, and repentance is the same moral experience regarded from the side of man, but in neither the one aspect nor the other can we speak of beings who have as yet no moral experience at all.

There is nothing in the N.T. either about the new birth or about baptism which cannot be explained from experiences specifically and exclusively Christian.

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